The Stepfords have seen off Xena and co

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A troubled world wants women back in the kitchen and with the
family, at least on TV, writes Stacey Kalish.

Flicking through the TV guide one day in my apartment in New
York, I was struck by the titles of new programs in the season's
line-up - Wife Swap, Trading Spouses: Meet your New
Mommy, My Wife and Kids and the most-talked about,
publicised show of them all, Desperate Housewives.

What happened to Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Xena:
Warrior Princess or Alias? Where did all the strong,
independent, scissor-kick wielding women go? Why have we gone from
"sex in the city" to "sex in the suburbs"?

Action chicks or working women have been ousted by the housewife
who is sweeping the ratings, literally, broom and spoon in
hand.

While Desperate Housewives still has to win over its
audience, it can feel fairly confident of its success given its
killer ratings in the US and Golden Globe wins. Australian viewers
are about to experience the allure of a show that is more than just
its "yummy mummies" and cheeky plot twists but instead drives past
the picturesque veneers of topiaries and framed family portraits
and heads straight for the more interesting, honest and ambiguous
space of the housewife's domain. Her perennial grievances, from the
unappreciative husband to the demanding expectations placed on
mothers can now be tuned into. And while women viewers can
experience cathartic voyeurism watching themselves and their lives
played out on the screen, the show also reveals culture's
paradoxical desire to return to, but escape from, the paradigm of
family.

Desperate Housewives is about four non-feminist
archetypes who live in an affluent suburb - the sexy, bored
adulteress, the uptight and brittle Stepford perfectionist, the
lonely divorcee and the harried mother of four who traded her
career to be a full-time mum and always appears to be a heartbeat
away from a meltdown. They are united by the suicide of a seemingly
happy friend, who narrates the series from the grave.

Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times described the
show as "entertaining, but it turns the clock back to pre-Betty
Friedan America, lampooning four bored, frustrated, white
upper-middle-class ladies who lunch". While the Sex and the
City gang would lunch at trendy cafes or swap bedroom tricks
over cosmopolitans, the ladies of suburbia fraternise around
kitchen tables over mugs of coffee as they swap clues and new
information about their friend's mysterious death. It's difficult
to discern whether their search for answers behind Mary Alice's
suicide is driven by genuine concern and the need for resolution
or, simply, sheer boredom and momentary respite from their own
domestic narratives.

"The series has its comic moments, but it is somewhat
atavistic," Stanley writes. "It takes a sour, retro look at the
female condition - marriage is either boring or cruel and men are
dull or beastly."

But women are relating. Besides the "through the roof" ratings
of the show, feedback from audiences suggests that desperation
resonates.

The show resonates by flaunting the lies, grief and anxieties
that housewives often deny experiencing. Women watch as domestic
realities, from adultery to divorce, hyperactive toddlers to
precocious teens, are enacted on screen. The idea that the "truth
shall set you free" is a screaming metatext of the show.

And that's what Desperate Housewives attempts and
succeeds at - articulating what women want to hear: we all live
lives of quiet desperation. So why, more than half a century after
those kitsch '50s "Stepford wife" type sitcoms and after a long run
of females as action heroines, professional protagonists or horny
career women, do we return to the conventional images of mum in the
kitchen?

The return to images of the family with mum as the epicentre is
attractive given the cultural climate. As the war in Iraq drags on
and the world is in the grips of a hostile and divisive political
period, images of mum in the kitchen offer a welcome relief. A
return to the suburbs may be the visual pacifier that resonates
with viewers trying to "numb" themselves, even briefly, from the
trouble in Iraq and the fear of terrorism.

But television isn't only serving milk and cookies. The
resurrection of this housewife figure is shrouded with ambivalence
and while scenes of domesticity assuage in some sense, they are
disturbing in the paradoxes they raise. While Desperate
Housewives replaces the Sex and the City women and
indicates a rejection of the independent working woman, they also
portray the picture of unhappy housewives trapped by their
domesticity.

These shows, while celebrating the comeback of the housewife,
also admit the discontent with this domestic status quo. The stench
of dirty laundry permeating from Wisteria Lane reeks of more than
brats, adultery and divorce. Instead, viewers may catch a whiff of
the desperation they can relate so well to or peek over their
white-picket fences and see a glimpse of the ambiguity living next
door.